Our Game Revisions: Our Vision

With the all mighty Level Up Event coming soon (in about 2 weeks), we wanted a professor's opinion for our game. We understood going into the meeting, our game didn't look so good, however game play was there. From the meeting this is what we gathered, the menu needed to be improved, the game play needed to be easier, more responsive, and we needed a distinct style.

Menu

Although we acknowledged the menu wasn't the most pretties menu, but we never really touched it for a long time. It wasn't until the meet where our Professor commented on how atrocious it was.

This may just be the 1st page, however one major comment was that there was just too much text, buttons, and a generic background. Comparing this to a nicer introduction menu, such as to Call of Duty:Black Op's menu, we can see the need for less buttons, and something better in the background.

With that in mind I introduce to you the new and improved menu, with a much more cleaner interface.

Gameplay 

The major complain was the game was too hard 

Though we set out to make the game hard as a design choice, we never really had proper external testing to show how hard it was. Once our professor played it, we saw how difficult the game was and how some necessary some game play features were.

To fix this, we implemented "player invincibility", which gave the player temporary invincibility for 1 second if they were hit. This would give allow the player to not die from a massive swarm of enemies in 1 hit, which was frustrating. Power ups were added to help the player deal with the increasing difficultly of waves of enemies. As you can see below, in the current build of our game, you turn blue, if you are invincible.

Feed back was needed 

Even playing the game, there was no way for the player to truly feel immersed in the game, because there were no ques that something had happened. For example if you shot an enemy, how do you know that we hit it. If a boss it coming how do you know that it is a boss,or if we used a power up such as cloak, how do give the feeling you are invisible.

 
To solve this, we had the enemy turn red when the player hit them like in other games.We fixed our audio ques to communicate with the player what is happening. We plan to add text to communicate messages if there is something important happening, such as a boss incoming, or bombing the enemy if hes beneath us. Finally we plan to add glow to the player if hes invisible, or to powerups to give them more of a friendly look.

Distince Style

This was a feature in our game which never really got touched on due to the lack of interest in a style.  While we just wanted art assets, and the game engine to be hard coded, we never thought how powerfull a style can make a gamer feel. Once we decided how our game would look, we would design our assets and shaders from there.

However none of us are artists, and as you can tell from the picture of our game above, we never conveyed a distinct style. What we need to do was to decide on one simple one and develop from there.

Style 1: Neon 

We could go with a simple based game which involves a pure neon style, fitted with glow shaders and deffered lighting

 Style 2: Cartoon

Or we can try to go for cartoony simple look, where every ship looks like it from a Saturday cartoon, and we shade it when toon shading.

In the end, we have to decide within 2 weeks from now, and commit to that style for the next 2 weeks. Hopefully we can proudly go to Level Up, with a game to truly represent our year.